Dear readers, This piece about the author Paul Yoon and his dog is wholly charming. Not that you need an excuse to look at the pets of writers, but their story is germane: Yoon’s new novel, “Etna,” is an “Odyssey”-esque story of a military dog in an unnamed country trying to find his way home. It’s very possible Yoon wouldn’t have written the book, let alone filtered it through the mind of an animal, if not for his deep bond with his own dog, Oscar. Granted, Oscar and Etna don’t seem to share much life experience. Oscar, a 70-pound lab mix, has a pretty bucolic life in Hudson, N.Y., punctuated by cheese and belly rubs, while Etna was trained in the harrowing arts of war. In an author’s note Yoon credits John Berger’s novel “King,” which is also narrated by a dog, as inspiration. But when it comes to animal narrators in literature, there are plenty of good examples, contemporary and classic. Henry Hoke’s novel “Open Throat” was narrated by a mountain lion skulking around the Hollywood hills, ruminating on past loves and the nature of earthquakes. George Saunders, long before he turned his attention to rapacious, dying C.E.O.s confronting their karma, wrote a story about an eavesdropping fox. And of course there’s “Animal Farm,” George Orwell’s agricultural critique of Stalinism, with its pointed characters including pigs named Snowball and Napoleon. I remember slipping the book in my dad’s carry-on before a long-haul flight, despite his dyslexia and nearly extinct attention span. But he tried. “Sweetheart,” he said after landing, “what did I just read?” See you on Friday. In other news
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Love this email? Forward to a friend. Want this email? Sign-up here. Have a suggestion for this email? Then send us a note at books@nytimes.com.
|
